Nikita Mikhalkov's The Barber of Siberia, 1998, is a remarkably executed production despite flaws in the script and direction. Received coolly at Cannes, the film nonetheless showcases Mikhalkov's extravagant flair for period atmosphere.
Using fin de siecle political upheavals as an allegory for their contemporary counterparts, and then foregrounding a love story among them, is problematic: can merging Anna Karenina with Titanic ever really work?
The film's narrator Jane Callahan (Julia Ormond), writing a letter to her son in 1905 America, flashbacks into 1885 Russia where young cadet Andrei Tolstoy (Oleg Menshikov) is thrown into her train compartment as she is reading Anna Karenina. She is an American who is "ignorant of Russia" but who comes to know it as the events of the film progress.
Over three hours, Mikhalkov's film boasts a ball; a military pledge of loyalty to the Tsar; a duel; the uniquely Russian festivities of Forgiveness Day; a comic proposal scene; a romantic love scene; an opera performance in which Tolstoy plays Figaro; an affair climaxing in misunderstanding; a heart-breaking farewell-at-the-train-station scene; a Godzilla-like chase of villagers through a Siberian forest cross cut with another nostalgic parting; and a finale in which a 1905 drill sergeant announces to his soldiers from atop a cliff that Mozart is a great composer.
Besides contrasting the fading cultural wealth of 19th century Europe with the degeneracy of the contemporary scene, the film parallels the corruption of Russia's ruling class who grant Douglas McCracken, the greedy American entrepreneur -- disappointingly performed by Richard Harris -- permission to butcher the Siberian forests with his Jurassic machine, the Barber of Siberia of the title, with the tragedy of the two unlikely lovers, Jane and Tolstoy. Jane, the initially whorish American businesswoman, rescues McCracken's business by successfully pretending to be his daughter and seducing the Russian officials, and then marries him while Tolstoy, who sacrifices his career to demonstrate his jealousy over Jane, is imprisoned then exiled to a remote Siberian village.
This extravagant orchestration of the turn-of-the century novelistic romance, scripted by Mikhalkov together with Rustam Ibragimbekov, unfortunately contains terrible performances by miscast actors. Was the English language really so popular in 19th century Russia? Even the prison guard is Anglicised. The thank-you-message-delivered finale strikes an equally wrong note. The film's chief merits, however, lie in its luxurious production, lavish in real crowds scenes, which computer graphics have made obsolete, and Mikhalkov's distinguished visual sense.

Submitted by Kay